Lies Under Ice Reviews

[i]Lies under Ice[/i] is a interactive science fiction novel, this review is based on a single play through. The year is 2079 and you are leading the mission to establish a settlement on Europa. The setting is mostly realistic, although there looks to be some weirdness if you interact with the aliens more than I did. I enjoyed the game and thought there was a good balance of personal interactions, resource management, scientific exploration, and political intrigue. The resource management sub-game allowed you to prioritise which aspects of the based you wanted to develop. However, it was fairly light touch as the medium is not well suited to detailed resource management play. The only thing I sometimes found slightly annoying was that the options for the political choices did not always contain my preferred mix of compromises and trade-offs. However, that's an inherent limitation of the format (compared to table-top RPGs) as the number of choices has to be constrained. Overall, I recommend [i]Lies Under Ice[/i] to anyone interested in playing a semi-realistic space colonisation story-game.

Pleasantly re-playable and thought provoking. There are some weak spots in the story and the ending seems rushed in certain scenarios, but that's not unusual for this type of game. You get an enormous amount of play out of it when it's all said and done.

The premise is cool, the execution feels half-baked. Also the end came way to abruptly unfortunately. For the price, you can get a much better text-based adventure story.

Simply AMAZING! Depending on if you speed run choices, 8.6 hours of fun in spite of the "200000" word count. Plenty of replayability to be found, thanks to those perennial "What-If" questions trotting in our heads. It's a mix of everything: action, management, philanthropic, philosophical strife, a bit of interpersonal interactions sprinkled in-between. Good pace. I really felt like what I undertook moved the plot forward in a grandiose and meaningful way. I must say right now, if you slip up, don't be discouraged! You just might get a chance to make up for it. Keep moving forward, and it'll fall into place... My first (and only) play through (as of now) as Captain Lev Éclat, a Libertarian arcologist went swimmingly. Now, let me tell you all about it! Firstly, you are given a lot of leeway as to how you perceive yourself and want to be perceived. For instance, the customization options (name [first and last], sex [woman, man, neither], background [three factions with two title each; six different possibilities of your position of authority], career [six different jobs], skills, hobbies, and the likes) and the building options (where I pick to land, how we build the base on Europa, the order in which each new building is constructed, etc.) are vast but not overwhelming nor underwhelming. In fact, you can develop your character and their personality the most as you play. You actually are given the power of choice. Professed the right to dream. Also, your modus operandi varies on what you do and propound. You can be inclined to put the welfare of your people above all else (like I did), choose to be strictly business and science-like, work with your own interests in mind, act as a medium to further humanity's colonization reach. The opportunities are abounding. There are romance partner encounters peppered throughout the game (you will meet them if you have yet to start dating. …I think??), but you should keep in mind that some people may already be in a relationship or are merely uninterested in a love life. Rest assured, that is not the main focus of the story. It’s meager, at best. Secondly, you must be witty, cunning. The reason for this is the magic of interactive novels: diverging paths. Well, I suppose the story is semi-linear, given that there is an ultimate goal and the game does eventually end, though how and why and who you achieve this with is up to your brain and your brawn. Beware! Semantics are a black beast. Mundane tasks and things asked of you may have underlying, drastic repercussions. Your traits affect the story in predictable yet diversifying ways. You will often notice a passage, look inside your stats, and tell yourself, “hey! It’s because of…” It comes with the turf! Remember that career you chose at the beginning? Yeah, it comes with a perk. For example, the arcologist is a master of "sculpting", thus enabling stronger constructions of your bases, be it under the ice, above ground, or on water. You also receive another perk by picking a hobby. Great. Thirdly, I was the best person I could possibly be. An honest, warm person. I was the leader of the expedition, so I was the captain of our spaceship, the Asterion. Fittingly, when given the choice to do so, I named the place where we landed, and by extension the name of our community, Asterion Abyss. Due to my Libertarian roots, in my head, "a leader is called a Captain", so that was my rank as a leader. Indeed, I had been placed Captain the first time around, and after four years I proved my worth and why I should keep leading by demonstrating the quality of life improvements I brought, got reelected for another five years. I led my people on a blazing path of glory. We endured harsh times, but we thrived in the end. I dwelled under the ice, lived above ground, scoured snowy plains, and explored caverns and the sea. Not only that, but I tried to please everyone while remaining firm, but understanding, in my reasoning. Thinking I had their best interests in mind, I pulled my weight around while accepting their input, and it worked! Nice. Sometimes, thing were awry, but my acumen pulled us through. I helped out on Europa just as I helped out with tensions on Earth, Luna (the Moon), and a bit of Mars. I helped design the habitats, piloted our first submarine, prevented destruction, soothed ruffled feathers, and fought evil. Most choices I made were wise, though sometimes the world wanted me to fail: things got bad. Real bad. Of course, a Captain must tend to its fleet. So, I assumed responsibility, admitted my shortcomings as the leader, and promptly resolved any arising quandaries. Near the end, I became a War Hero (that's an achievement!) by fighting back against [SECRET}. At the end of my adventures, I went back to Earth to carry out my final days. I might have lived 60+ years living in and building a partly self-sufficient Europa colony, but I went back to my roots nonetheless. Overall, Lies under Ice is an agreeable game. Calculated. Mind-wracking. Thrilling. In other words, pretty cool. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it is the BEST CoC game. No, that would be unfair, as I believe all Choice of Games are delightful in their own rights. They're passion projects made by passioned people who want to share their passion with people whose passion is reading interactive novels, and some of those stories are about passion. Anyway. As with many other games published by Choice of Game, the game shines the brightest with the element of surprise due to a consistency in perpetuation of events. Many throwbacks can be found. Stuff transpires, you make a choice, you are left to dread if that was the right thing, and that makes it all the more exciting! Chekhov's gun is loaded: the storyboard is decently put together, and every choice I chose actually had a significant impact later on. I was oftentimes surprised by a choice or something I said earlier that came back to bite me in the hind. Naturally, you are given the tools to have a fighting chance. Still, nothing beats being in a pickle, no? Very fun! <3 Buy this game on discount (as it is at the time of writing this!) or at full price… I liked it. I sincerely hope you will enjoy this as much as I did! :D Thank you for this, Joey Jones!

Cool story! This one made me go back and play the author's other title, Trials of the Thief-Taker. Just surface level, but I think this story does a better job with world building and that sort of thing, whereas the other title maybe did a little better regarding character interaction. I love the idea of setting up a distant moon base, the struggles that come with that, and the surprises you find there. Almost feels like Frostpunk in a way, given the conditions on the ground there. Some interesting characters, at least one with a very unique backstory. The time span of the story due to the nature of space travel times and so on, necessitates a number of time skips. This allows you to see the development of the moon, as well as distant events back home, which is awesome. What seems to suffer just a bit, maybe, is the character interactions over this span of time. There are great moments with various characters, it's just that they are often months or years apart (which happens very often in any game/story I see with big time skips). Sometimes you're made aware of what others have been up to in the intervening period, but other times it is not so obvious (or perhaps left up to reader's imagination). I guess it would be a difficult balancing act, to be fair. [spoiler] Sometimes I felt like I knew more about Virginia and Lucky's relationship than my own haha but that's okay [/spoiler] Also, the epilogue seemed a little more detailed than with Trials, so that's nice. Enjoyed it!

The game does feel authentic in putting you in the position of managing a colony, especially on the back of managing factions, as there are plenty. Story is pretty solid, though I feel there is somethings that can be improved in the epilogue, to give perhaps a flavor to what factions won out and which did not. I enjoyed the personality implied of the characters, and how it did not take away from the backdrop. SPOILER WARNING: I will also say, though, that the ending felt a bit...malign, in application. Perhaps it was due to the idea of needing some grandiose conflict to round out the story, but I wonder if maybe it could've sufficed with the what was present at the start? I will give it another run through to see if the ending and the chapters change a bit more based on certain decisions. But overall, I laud this story.

The premise is great, it's just unfinished and buggy. The moment the world-building seems to go somewhere, it drops right off the cliff. Story looks like a good roadmap for a 3D game.

Really cool concept, but the choices seem irrelevant to the colony's development. A simple, non-spoiler example of this is that prioritizing which modules to build is something that comes up often, but doesn't seem to change what actually gets built. Admittedly, I could be wrong about that, but there is a bigger problem: the ending is just a complete mess. I won't spoil what happens except to say there is a massive disconnect between the situation at the end of the story and the start of the epilogue.

I rather enjoyed this one. It's an interesting setting, you have a lot to do, and the various directions the story can go are intriguing. It's held back by some really unfortunately poor tracking of variables that led to a confusing climax and ending. For example, there was a character who I sent back to Earth who randomly showed up in a later scene. The epilogue was a mess. There were 3 or 4 different ways that a VERY SPOILER thing could have gone, call them A, B, C, D. I managed to negotiate a way towards A, but in the epilogue the first page said B happened, then the next page of the epilogue contradicted the previous and said C happened. Similar stuff went on across the board in the epilogue, like some characters who I'd gotten along with and supported all game were said to have moved to Io because I had spurned them. It all made for a rather disappointing ending, since it didn't reflect how any of the events had actually played out. Maybe with some bug fixes it'll be a terrific release. Despite the problems, it really was good. More engaging than a bunch of recent CoG releases.

This game is a disjointed mess. It tries to be too many different things at once and ends up sucking at all of them. The only thing I found mildly entertaining was the base building, but even that seemed to have little to no impact on the story. Romance options are so sparse that entire part of the story could be cut with little to no effect. They seem to be thrown in as an afterthought more than anything. Example, my RO comes up to me in the first third of the story and admits she is cheating on me. I break it off and there are zero other chances to start a new romance or even rekindle it w/ the cheater. Again, this was in the first third of the story, so you interact w/ your former RO and other potential ROs, but the option to pursue them just never appears again. Other characters are so forgettable that I found myself skipping through large blocks of dialogue just to maybe get another chance to run my damn colony instead of blabbering on with (Insert weird ethnically appropriate named trope of a character here). One character in my play through even gets killed at one point in the most ridiculous way imaginable (craw fish...craw fish) and I, for the life of me couldn't recall who the hell he was or how my MC knew him. For the all the reaction of the MC in the story, other than the initial "Oh no! Not (insert NPC name here)!" as they die on one page of dialogue, my MC didn't seem to care too much either. Never even mentioned them or the killer craw fish again. Finally, the foreshadowing of this is so on the nose and it's pretty much right there on the store page itself, so I am not even going to deign it with a spoiler block. Eventually, through the story you end up encountering what may or may not be sapient life. You have your first encounter. The "aliens" get mentioned a few more times in following chapters. You have to deal with some issues related to your colonists and the possible existence of the "aliens." You end up finding what might be one, so you have to make a decision about what to do w/ it or how to approach it. Then some stuff goes down on Earth where you have some decisions to make affecting your colony and the relationships with the off-world. Then, bam, the aliens may or may not be attacking! Perhaps they are just trying to communicate? Who knows? The author then spends probably three to four times the dialogue on dealing with the alien "attack / non-attack-attempt-to-communicate-maybe" than he does in previous chapters even talking about the damn aliens. Literally, "do you stop and grab meds from the med bay or continue? Do you grab heavy weights from the gym to use as weapons? If so do you go or do you send someone else?" type decisions. Then you get to the source of the "attack," make one...ONE decision and BAM! Four screen Epilogue, which in my play through encompasses....sixty friggin years of time leap. Most of the Epilogue doesn't even jive with the previous decisions I had made. Most critically, it didn't match up with the decision I had just made on the screen before when I decided how to respond to the alien attack/attempt to communicate. TL/DR: Garbage. This might be one of the worse Choice of Games I have ever played and this is saying something considering the absolute trash CoG has been expelling recently.